This invention relates generally to social networking systems, and in particular to categorizing stories generated for a news feed.
Social networking systems allow their users to share their interests and engage with other users of the social networking systems by sharing photos, real-time status updates, social game updates, and other content items. Additionally, a social networking system may generate stories for its users that describe actions performed by other users. For example, stories generated by the social networking system may describe a variety of actions, including recent moves to a new city, graduations, births, engagements, marriages, and the like, as well as more mundane content such as status messages, information about what music has been listened to by users, and recent check-in events at coffee shops.
As users become more connected with other users and entities on the social networking system, the number of content items provided to the users increases exponentially. Existing social networking systems order content items in reverse chronological order such that newly published content is displayed first. While social networking systems may rank content items based on user interests and affinities for other users, providing a continuous and chronological stream of content items to users may obscure content items and make it more difficult for a user to locate desired content items. This impairment of user experience may result in users becoming less engaged with a social networking system.